2018 Germany & USA Collaboration

About the Collaboration

In fall/winter semester 2018, third-year bachelor-level business students taking a leadership course at Justus Liebig Universität in Gießen, Germany collaborated with first-year (BBA) students at UW-Whitewater taking their first business course. While each course had its own learning objectives, they shared a common question to help students increase their preparedness, sensitivity, patience and flexibility when it comes to working with people from different cultures.

Students at both universities were assigned a case study and challenged to make personnel recommendations using their knowledge about leadership traits and GLOBE cultural dimensions. Prior to any information or activities, participants completed a pre-assignment survey that measured cultural intelligence (CQ model), perceptions of national cultural characteristics (GLOBE dimensions), and personality types (Big 5 Personalities). Students from both institutions were paired with one to two colleagues at the other and assigned a one-hour timeframe to get acquainted, discuss the case and debate recommendations. Each participant was also provided with a personalized discussion guide that contained overall and personal scores for GLOBE dimensions and personality traits. WebEx was used so students could see as well as speak with each other. Following the collaboration session, students completed a post-assignment survey. The final deliverable for students was a short paper about the activity and their decisions.

Of the 181 students that participated in the project, 170 completed both the pre- and post-assignment surveys. Paired t-tests were run on all GLOBE dimensions to determine if the experience had any impact on views of students’ own culture. The same analysis was run on the CQ dimensions. Results suggest that the experience had a significant effect on student perceptions of his/her own culture as measured by the nine GLOBE dimensions (p <.001). They became more aware of their own cultural traits by speaking with a peer from another country.

Overall results of CQ revealed a significant difference in response by gender. While CQ changes among men was insignificant, female respondents experienced significant growth in CQ Action (p <.05) as well as near significant growth in CQ Knowledge (p <.06) and CQ Strategy (p <.06).

Linear regression was also used to determine the impact of personality type on changes in CQ dimensions. Preliminary results suggest that students gender as well as personality types Agreeableness and Consciousness, impacted growth in all CQ dimensions.

Conclusions

Given the positive impact demonstrated through survey results and positive feedback in student papers, this collaboration test has been deemed successful by the participating instructors. It will be repeated in the fall/winter 2019 semester and more students are expected to participate.

Approximately 700 UW-Whitewater business students take BEINDP 101 – Business and Society every semester. To enable more of these students to participate, more students at other partner schools are needed. The structure of the program enables the assignment to be implemented at multiple institutions, not just JLU and UW-Whitewater.

If you are interested in learning more about this opportunity or exploring other collaboration opportunities, please contact Dr. Carol Scovotti, Director, Institute for International Business Collaboration.